The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (7 page)

Ike
is preoccupied with hidden motives, and nothing makes him happier than when, presented with something fairly straightforward—a bus driver’s request for exact change, for instance—he can burrow into deeper and deeper netherworlds of subtext and sub-subtext, disclosing for himself ever-murkier layers of bewildering intrigue and subterfuge, because he believes that it’s only when confronted with something that completely befuddles us that we experience the sense of “speechless wonder” (
thaumazein
) that opens us up to a fleeting intimation of the sacred. To
Ike
, the Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles. (Hey, maybe this is why he concocted that whole story about being hit by a Hasidic ambulance years ago when he’d so irrefutably been hit by a
Mister Softee
truck—to obfuscate the obvious and thus anoint it with a residue of divinity!) So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the guy would eschew books in his native English and opt instead to pore over texts in languages he can’t remotely understand (particularly German). Nor should it come as any great shock that, if he’s not at the gym or making a lewd breadcrumb mandala or feeding his wife a Fig Newton, you’ll probably find
Ike
(“seething and petulant butcher, coiled with energy”) on his stoop or in the park or at the Miss America Diner “reading” his German books, even though he can’t understand a single word of German (in the strict sense of the word “understand”), because they are, for him,
in his own mind,
like magical incantations, and he’s able to distill the most essential, the most profound, esoteric, and mystical significance, not from their semantic content, but purely from the
sounds
of the words, from their
music
. And so he’ll sit there on the hot subway, hunched over his unintelligible text and swaying with concentration (and missing his stop), mouthing a passage—like the following one—out loud, over and over to himself, like some zealous foreign understudy learning his lines phonetically, or—better analogy—like some super-sexy (and totally shredded!) priest who’s been sent off to a hopelessly remote mission in the jungle, and, sitting on a sweltering train as it steams into the dark interior of the country, is zealously trying to learn the dying language of the head-hunting heathens he’s been sent to proselytize, even though he suspects, and perhaps half desires, that instead of gratefully receiving the sacrament, they might very well flog, flay, boil, and consume him:

It’s usually at this point in almost every authenticated version of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
—following “Comments (Newest First)”—that
Ike
strolls to the Miss America Diner (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver), where he engages in an extended adagio with
The Waitress
, ordering a tongue sandwich, discussing the erotics of second-person POV during endodontic procedures, and writing the lyrics to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (
Ike
’s Song)” that
The Kartons
will sing at the “Last Concert.” (In traditional public recitations, the bards—vagrant, drug-addled, and almost always blind, but sometimes just severely dyslexic—are expected to chant all 9,709 of the “Comments,” and not just the seventeen included here, especially if the performance is taking place in a remote, rural area “where the pace of life is unhurried, where the air is fragrant with the aromas of shearing sheds and cattle yards, honeysuckle or corn dogs from some fair, and where the appetite for orally transmitted, maddeningly repetitive epic entertainment remains unsated.”)

The image of “
Ike
the Flâneur” strolling to the Miss America Diner has become one of the most familiar and iconic representations of the sinewy and reticent hero who, in addition to being convinced that Goddesses are almost continuously leering at him from the top floor of the Burj Khalifa and masturbating, believes that Western materialism—most perfectly embodied by privileged celebrities—is polluting the soul of every living creature in the world (in addition to the souls of human beings,
Ike
believes that Western materialism is also polluting the souls of animals, especially house sparrows, swans, and mice).

Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. But don’t worry—he’s loaded with gem-like aperçus and aphorisms! For example:

For anyone attending
a performance of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
today, there’s likely to be little if any suspense about what actually happens. The story, with its escalating crises, divine interventions, and hyperviolent denouement, is so well known by now that an audience at a public recitation would not only be able to anticipate every single plot point, but would probably know many of the lines by heart and almost be able to lip-sync along with the bards. And they’d know the history of the making of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
They’d know how each “section” became known as a “Session” and then as a “Season.” They’d know how these Seasons were produced—over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of years—by nameless, typically blind men, high on ecstasy or ketamine, seated in a circle, and chanting for hours and hours on end as they sipped orange soda from a jerrycan; and how every new improvisational flourish, every exegetical commentary and meta-commentary, every cough, sniffle, and hiccough on the part of the bard is incorporated into the story, and is then required in each subsequent performance; and how numerous unrelated episodes have, over the centuries, fallen into the epic’s orbit and gradually become incorporated into the epic itself; and how vernacular variants are incessantly generated in its mutagenic algorithms; how it’s been “produced” through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy, more closely resembling the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional “writing.”

Adults and children alike would be familiar enough with the plot to already know (before the bards even opened their mouths to deliver the first words “There was never
nothing
” ) that the saga of
Ike
begins with him making a lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs for the Goddess
La Felina
and then engaging in an extended adagio with the waitress at the Miss America Diner and writing his narcocorrido “That’s Me (
Ike
’s Song)”; they’d already know that
Ike
gets high with his daughter’s boyfriend,
Vance
, and makes a list for him called “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F)” and neglects to include the Goddess
Shanice
, which incurs her eternal wrath (FYI:
La Felina
was #1 on his list); and that
Koji Mizokami
, the God who fashioned the composer
Béla Bartók
out of his own testicular teratoma, helps
Ike
shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey; and that
Bosco Hifikepunye
begins supplying
Vance
with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street; and that
Ike
goes to Port Newark for a tryst with
La Felina
, who’s transformed herself into a container ship; and that she promises
Ike
that before he martyrs himself, she’ll appear to him in human form and fuck him; and that she says she’ll get in touch with him on his cellphone and let him know exactly when and where; and they know that he’s photographed there by the ATF; and they’d already know that while
Ike
is interviewing for a butcher’s job at Costco, a God impregnates his daughter; and that
Ike
accidentally kills his father as they wrestle for Ike’s cellphone because
Ike
’s father is trying to change
Ike
’s ringtone from “Me So Horny” to
John Cage
’s
4'33"
—the composer’s notorious “silent composition” consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing (e.g., a pianist going to the keyboard and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds)—and
Ike
immediately realizes, to his horror, that having
Cage
’s
4'33"
as a ringtone would essentially mean that he’d have
no
ringtone, and that he’d almost inevitably miss
La Felina
’s call, which, for
Ike
, is literally the booty-call of a lifetime; and they’d already know that on the morning of his father’s funeral,
Ike
wakes up with a incredibly gross (“grotesquely purulent”) case of conjunctivitis and, after delivering the eulogy (a phantasmagorically anti-Semitic diatribe, akin to
Céline
’s
Bagatelles pour un Massacre
), he tries to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation; and that his daughter gives birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named “
Colter Dale
”; and that soon after
The Kartons
begin their “Last Concert” (which happens to be their
first
concert), the ATF/Mossad raid on the compound begins; and that after retreating into his two-story brick “hermitage” and reciting
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
in its entirety to the infant
Colter Dale
,
Ike
is killed. (And they know that, in a coda,
Colter Dale
—who mythologically functions as
Ike
’s successor—explains how
Ike
’s so-called “delusions” are actually irrefutable proof of the Gods’ existence.)

So audiences do not necessarily have to concentrate on each word, gesture, or nuance of meaning that comes from the bards. If your neighbor talks, you don’t try to quiet him. The overall impression at most recitations is chaos, as food vendors, children, and adults ceaselessly move up and down the aisles. No one can be expected to sit through an eight- or nine-hour performance without talking, eating, or getting up. Young children romp in the aisles, and when the action gets exciting they mass by the footlights like moths drawn to a flame. The predominantly female audience will continue to talk long after a recitation has begun. Many people doze during less interesting scenes and, in fact, bring their own straw mats on which they sit and sleep.

But when the bards’ recitations get particularly lurid (e.g., the scene in the
Tenth Season
in which
Ike
goes to his daughter’s school to have a meeting with her math teacher, loses his temper, and threatens to sodomize the teacher if he doesn’t agree to give her a passing grade), spectators leap to their feet and the children howl with uproarious laughter, clap, whistle, and yell out encouragement. It may shock some people unfamiliar with orally transmitted epics that audiences would find men threatening each other with anal rape so entertaining. Perhaps it’s not hard to understand why uneducated, working-class, middle-aged women might find homoerotic sadism wildly diverting—but children? It could very possibly be that the children don’t even understand the content of what’s being chanted here at all (the language in this Season is almost impenetrably thick with
de Sadean
bombast) and are being whipped into paroxysms of excitement by nothing more than the hysterical cacophony of the bards. Also, the scene has an undeniable slapstick quality, with all its tumultuous, pants-at-the-knees, chase-me-around-the-office antics. And usually bards portray the math teacher as such a stock commedia dell’arte villain—i.e. the sanctimonious martinet moonlighting as JV basketball coach and driver’s ed instructor, etc.—that it’s easy to cheer on
Ike
, even if you disapprove of his cell-block bluster.

There was one prominent and controversial expert who actually believed that the traditional style of the bards (i.e., slurred, mumbling, etc.) so garbles the content of what they are chanting that almost no literal meaning is actually ever transmitted.
Jake S. Emig
, in an erudite and exquisitely reasoned treatise, only slightly marred by vitriolic ad hominem attacks on several female colleagues (who’d reportedly objected to explicit photographs of himself that he’d texted them), contended that since audiences can’t understand anything that the bards are chanting, they are creating each time, almost out of whole cloth,
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
for themselves, out of what they think they hear. After subjecting thousands of hours of taped recitations to sophisticated audiological analysis, he wrote, “It is more than likely that there is no originative, coherent epic, that there is merely a succession of misinterpretations of the bards’ muffled cacophony, of their static, their white noise.”
Emig
, an enigmatic figure, started his career as a semiprofessional hockey player. For several years he was a forward for Thetford Mines Isothermic, a team in the Ligue Nord-​Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), which is generally considered the most violent hockey league in the world.
Emig
’s teammates on Thetford Mines Isothermic included veteran NHL defenseman
Yves Racine
and right winger
Gaetan Royer
, who played games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2001–02 season and also played for the Bartercard Gold Coast Blue Tongues in the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL) in 2008.
Emig
was forced to retire from professional hockey as a result of post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a succession of DUI arrests. It was then that he became interested in the field of forensic audiology, received his Masters of Applied Science degree several years later, and soon thereafter became an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Forensic Audiology at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida. Almost immediately upon publication of
Emig
’s study, “Castles of Hardened Bullshit,” his work was completely discredited by discoveries that he’d crudely altered much of his audiological research to suit his thesis. Less than a week after these revelations surfaced,
Emig
was found dead at his gym, Bodies-N-Motion, on East Main Street in Leesburg. At first it was naturally assumed that
Emig
, distraught over the self-inflicted damage to his academic reputation, had committed suicide. But forensic allergists were able to determine that the scholar had succumbed to food-associated, exercise-induced anaphylaxis.
Emig
, who was allergic to shellfish, was also receiving weekly immunotherapeutic injections of dust-mite extract to treat his chronic allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. On the afternoon of his death, he’d ordered a bowl of
num pachok chon
(a Cambodian freshwater-snail noodle soup) from a food truck parked near campus. He’d been intrigued by a photograph of the dish taped to the truck, but was completely unaware of its ingredients. After consuming the soup,
Emig
went to the gym and began a vigorous session of aerobic exercise. Within a half hour, he reportedly broke out in giant hives, began to wheeze, vomited, collapsed across the elliptical, and died. There’s a significant cross-reactivity between house dust mites and snails, and the combination of dust-mite extract in the immunotherapy injections with the shellfish in the noodle soup and the strenuous exercise proved to be too much for
Jake Emig
’s system to withstand. Soon after his death, a law was enacted—known today as “Jake’s Law”—that makes it a federal crime to knowingly sell any noodle soup containing freshwater snails to anyone receiving immunotherapy injections of dust-mite extract.

Intriguingly, when volunteers at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida, who’d been locked in sweltering Porta-Johns and subjected to bards chanting the words “sugar frosted nutsack” nonstop for twelve hours, were asked what visual images occurred to them most frequently, the majority reported envisioning a white planet with a kind of scrotal topography (i.e., “ridged,” “wrinkled,” “corrugated,” etc.). Some simply saw the planet spinning in empty space. Others saw themselves actually on the planet, in a car on an empty highway traversing a desolate, bluish-white, furrowed landscape which radiated out infinitely to the horizon. One of the students (
Heidi
, a junior majoring in Public Safety Administration / Homeland Security who “loves Godiva chocolates and champagne”) visualized herself standing on the planet, disproportionately large, “like
The Little Prince
.”

The phrase “sugar frosted nutsack” occurs 3,385 times in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
(including this sentence). Scholars suspect that this number corresponds to Section 3385, Title 8, of the
California Code of Regulations:
“Appropriate foot protection shall be required for employees who are exposed to foot injuries from electrical hazards, hot, corrosive, poisonous substances, falling objects, crushing or penetrating actions, which may cause injuries, or who are required to work in abnormally wet locations.” It’s thought that this mystical numerological correspondence might derive from the concern that bards have traditionally had about maintaining the health of their feet, since they are peripatetic and spend the preponderance of their lives walking from village to village. (There are many other eerie mystical numerological correspondences. The flight distance between San Diego, California, and Bogotá, Colombia, is 3,385 miles. The date 3/3/85 is the birthday of Lithuanian supermodel
Dovile Virsilaite
. The sum of the digits—3+3+8+5—equals 19. The smallest number of neutrons for which there is no stable isotope is 19. The composer
Béla Bartók
finished his Opus 19 in 1919 when he was 38 (twice 19). The product of the digits—3
x
3
x
8
x
5—equals 360. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Petition for Amerasian,
Widow(er), or Special Immigrant is I-360. The area code for most of western Washington State, including the city of Bremerton, is 360.
Ben Gibbard
, the lead singer for
Death Cab for Cutie
, was born in, believe it or not, Bremerton! There are actually so many mystical numerological correspondences that you’re like, this is
so
fucking weird.)

The men who do attend public recitations of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
tend to be academic experts, connoisseurs by avocation, or individuals who aspire to be bards. Audiences, though, are composed predominantly of working-class, middle-aged women with little education, who are seeking to establish romantic relationships with the bards. These women chatter, eat, drink, smoke, spit betel juice and pumpkin seeds on the earthen floor, call raucously across the auditorium to each other, and, in imperious voices, order vendors to bring them fried chicken, beer, tampons, whatever they need at the moment. They frequently demonstrate the warmth of their feelings by giving small gifts to bards during the course of a performance. A “donor” will toss them gifts of cigarettes, candy, cologne, or a small amount of money. A gift is often wrapped in a note, requesting a favor of the bard in return. A bard may be asked, for instance, to perform a private recitation. In some cases, bards receive quite large sums of money or valuable gifts ranging from expensive toilet articles and wristwatches to flat-screen TVs, Mercedes-Benz cars, and luxury apartments—anything to pamper them. Often there is a sexual attachment between the donor and the bard. Liaisons between lusty middle-aged women and handsome young bards are especially common. Some of these women are widows, some are still married. They love to make a show of themselves at the public recitations and squander their husbands’ money on bards with whom they’ve become infatuated.